OF SELJ30ENE. 261 



This mount may journey, and, his present site 

 Forsaking, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer 

 The goodly plants, affording matter strange 

 For law debates ! " 



But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect 

 that though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that 

 the ends of many of them have slipped and fallen away at 

 distant periods, leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This 

 seems to have been the case with Nore and Whetham Hills, 

 and especially with the ridge between Harteley Park and 

 Word-le-ham, where the ground has slid into vast swellings 

 and furrows, and lies still in such romantic confusion as 

 cannot be accounted for from any other cause. A strange 

 event, that happened not long since, justifies our suspicions, 

 which, though it befell not within the limits of this parish, 

 yet, as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as the 

 circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a place in a 

 work of this nature. 



The months of January and February, in the year 1774, 

 were remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of 

 rain; so that, by the end of the latter month, the land- 

 springs, or lavants, began to prevail, and to be near as high 

 as in the memorable winter of 1764. The beginning of 

 March also went on in the same tenor, when, in the night 

 between the 8th and 9th of that month, a considerable part 

 of the great woody hanger at Hawkley was torn from its 

 place, and fell down, leaving a high free-stone cliff naked 

 and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It 

 appears that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped and 

 undermined by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, going 

 down in a perpendicular direction ; for a gate which stood 

 in the field, on the top of the hill, after sinking with its 

 posts for thirty or forty feet, remained in so true and 

 upright a position as to open and shut with great exactness, 

 just as in its first situation. Several oaks also are still 

 standing, and in a state of vegetation, after taking the 

 same desperate leap. That great part of this prodigious 

 mass was absorbed in some gulf below is plain also from the 

 inclining ground at the bottom of the hill, which is free and 



